Thursday Reader (10/24/13)

Excerpts from my feeds

A quick re-announcement: I get asked a lot what I’m reading, listening to and what I’m doing with social media. And so, every Thursday — barring some other writing necessity — I’ll be putting out a round-up of what caught my eye so far for the week. It is by no means comprehensive or intended to replace your regular feeds. This is my version of jotting down what I’m up to. Send me feedback so I can add, lose, modify or otherwise improve this project.

Shameless Plug

I got a lot of love from Minnesota-born reproductive justice warriors this week. Thanks to the spectacular Robin Marty and her piece in Rolling Stone, I got a lot of traffic directed to my piece on loving Obamacare. A tweet by Lizz Winstead was quite the “two” in the “one-two punch.” Thanks, Lizz!

“From computer programming to nuclear fission to the paper bag machine, it’s time to stop erasing these women from their great works.” By Tim Murphy and Tasneem Raja
I already love everything Tim Murphy does; now he’s more excellent, because, yeah:Ladies Last: 8 Inventions by Women That Dudes Got Credit For

Katha Pollitt does great essays on the long view of reproductive rights. This is no exception:
“Novelist Kate Manning richly reimagines Madame Restell as a defender of women from the horrors of poverty, male privilege and their own physiology.”The Notorious Life of a Nineteenth-Century Abortionist

You should already be following and reading my friend Dean Obeidallah all over the everywhere. He got beat up this week by FIVE separate publications for rightly attacking the horrible Ted Cruz and his bigotry. Check out Dean’s response in The Daily Beast:The Tea Party’s War on Comedy

Podcasts & clips:

I wanted to include a clip of Byron Hurt on Melissa Harris Perry last Sunday. The whole segment was amazing. He was amazing. I was actually crying relieved tears listening to him describe rape culture and the work he’s doing to change it. I’m sorry that because of MSNBC’s new website I can’t find it. It won’t even show up in a Google search. I’ll flip back through and see if I can get a producer to respond during the show this weekend. It’s timely, but not dated and will be just as powerful in my next post if I can get a hold of it.

Anytime Ari Berman is on a show somewhere, it’s bad news for voting in America. He joined Sam Seder on The Majority Report to talk about the far right, southern domination of the GOP and how voter discrimination is blazing through Arizona, Kansas and other states in the wake of SCOTUS gutting the Voting Rights Act.

I have a handful of podcasts I return to when I need a break from politics or am in the mood for good storytelling and humanity. If you haven’t discovered Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, I highly recommend it. He has a conversational style with guests that pulls details and life stories out of their heads and paints the emotional picture of who they are and where they’ve been. The recent episode with Laura Dern was an especially great episode:

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